What to Do About Ear Infections

Children treated with eardrops that provide simple pain relief do as well as children who receive antibiotics, according to a study presented at this week's Pediatric Academic Societies' Annual Meeting. The strategy satisfies parents and goes a long way to reducing overuse of antibiotics.

"What we found was that children who received the eardrops got better at the same rate as the kids on antibiotics, and, almost as importantly, the parents were equally satisfied with either treatment," study author Paul S. Matz, MD, tells WebMD.

Matz, a researcher in the department of pediatrics at Rhode Island Hospital, studied 88 children, aged 2-18, with ear infections. About half were given a prescription for an oral antibiotic, while the other half received a prescription for eardrops containing a pain reliever called Auralgan to numb the ear. All the children were re-evaluated after three to seven days of treatment.

Overall, approximately 89% of the children who received pain-relieving eardrops got well, compared with 95% of children on antibiotics. The parents of children in both groups reported similar satisfaction ratings.

"The 89% of children who got better with eardrops were spared antibiotics that would have been given to them [automatically]," says Matz.

Health experts suspect a link exists between overusing antibiotics to treat ear infections and the explosion of bacteria resistant to antibiotics -- a serious public health concern. "The main issue is antibiotic resistance. There are approximately 20-25 million cases of [ear infections] each year in the United States, and 98% or so are treated with antibiotics," says Matz, adding that in The Netherlands only 30% are treated with antibiotics.

"There is a fair amount of research that has already been done to show that most kids [with ear infections] will get better without antibiotics, especially older children, and if we can decrease [the number of prescriptions] even by half, that's 12 million fewer antibiotic prescriptions each year and that contributes greatly to [reducing] antibiotic resistance," he says.